Small but mighty Canada fights for space in highly competitive artificial intelligence world

There’s a global race underway to capitalize on artificial intelligence, a cutting-edge industry that’s no longer science fiction. Canada, looking to carve out its place, is up against world economic superpowers. Reporter Emma Graney visited China to explore the country’s growing AI expertise and what Canada needs to do to compete. Her reporting was supported with a fellowship from the Asia Pacific Foundation. This is the final instalment of a three-part series.

The brains behind Canada’s artificial intelligence strategy held a critical meeting in Montreal this week, an invitation-only affair at the InterContinental Hotel.

The meeting focused on the federally-funded AI strategy being led by the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR) and connected researchers, industry players and government representatives from across the nation. There, CIFAR named its first cohort of 29 AI research chairs. It was a major development in the strategy launched last year to keep Canada in the game as China pursues an aggressive AI plan pitting the Asian superpower against western world leaders.

Canada is small but mighty when it comes to AI, consistently punching above its weight thanks to far-sighted investments that began three decades ago.

Elissa Strome is the Pan-Canadian AI strategy director at CIFAR. She doesn’t tire of explaining how Canada managed to forge ahead in AI.

CIFAR was founded in 1982 with a research program called the artificial intelligence, robotics and society, Strome says. It led to years of groundbreaking research and, eventually, to a program in 2004 that brought together neuroscientists and computer scientists to compare notes.

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The 2004 program examined how human and animal brains learn, and applied those principles to computer learning.

“The idea seemed kooky at the time,” Strome said, “but it turned out to be very successful.”

She points to the AI-based products and services we see today — voice recognition, machine translation, object recognition — which are all are based on deep learning pioneered through the CIFAR program.

“That’s how we helped to establish this really cool field of research. We didn’t know at the time that it would be so successful or so integrated into today’s technology, but they really pushed the envelope of what was possible,” Strome said.

Canada’s early interest in deep learning allowed universities to attract the best and brightest researchers and students, and build thriving AI ecosystems across the country.

“That’s what we’re trying to do at the institute, keep Canadian AI research at the leading edge,” Strome said.

But what can Canada do when China is breathing down the neck of the West, pledging to be an AI research world leader by 2030?

“Very clearly, we cannot compete with China,” Strome said.

We’re a small nation, she says, with a small population and GDP. Canada must therefore be realistic.

University of Alberta artificial intelligence researcher Jonathan Schaeffer thinks China will quickly surpass the United States in AI advances.Larry Wong /
Postmedia, file

‘We can’t be everything to everybody’

University of Alberta computer science professor Jonathan Schaeffer thinks China will jet past the United States in 2019 in the AI stakes, if it hasn’t already done so.

Ten years ago, he says, research papers coming out of the Asian nation were substandard and poorly written; the kinds of publications Schaeffer would look at and reject five minutes later.

But last year, China was neck-and-neck with the United States in terms of high quality papers at the major AI conferences.

“In less than a decade they’ve turned it around, invested enormously in people and cutting-edge research, and the results are showing,” Schaeffer said.

“It’s not a question of whether they will … be the world-leaders in artificial intelligence. The question is, has it already happened?”

Schaeffer agrees with Strome that Canada must be picky about where it invests in AI.

“We can’t be everything to everybody,” he shrugs. “Maybe there are a few areas where we just have to make key strategic investments, and achieve world dominance in those areas.”

He also believes Canada lags behind when it comes to the entrepreneurial expertise in China or the U.S. — we simply don’t turn spin economic value from our high-quality research, he said.

Schaeffer, something of a godfather of AI, has been in the tech field for 35 years — and it sometimes leaves him scratching his head.

“For some reason, Canada across the whole tech sector has under-performed … in terms of taking technology out of the universities and building new companies that have enormous economic impact,” he said.

Government investments in AI research are all well and good, he said, but they need to work alongside a strategy to give that research economic value.

“You can’t pay off provincial debt with research results. You have to turn those research results into economic activity, jobs, wealth. And that means more people paying taxes and paying off the debt. We need to see that economic activity,” he said.

Incubating talent

The sapphire waters of Hong Kong’s Telegraph Bay glitter below the floor-to-ceiling windows of Cyberport, a technology incubator funded and run by the region’s government. Cyberport nurtures young startups and entrepreneurs in the digital industry, namely FinTech, eCommerce and the Big Data/AI sector.

Scattered throughout the complex are more than 100 companies of varying size, including Canadian data security outfit APrivacy. Founder and CEO Cedric Jeannot is a personable guy with a firm handshake, his short hair licked with grey at the temples.

He explains why his company chose to set up shop halfway across the world from its headquarters in Waterloo, Ont., back in 2014. APrivacy now has a solid foothold in Asia, but Cyberport’s “outstanding” facilities — not to mention the benefits of being surrounded by peers in other startups and mid-sized tech companies — means they’re staying put for the time being.

“We don’t have anything close to this in Canada,” Jeannot said.

Jeannot wants to see Canada take more of an interest in the wider Asian region.

“Yes, it’s physically far. Yes, you’re going to have to take a 16-hour plane. But if you look at the quality of the technology within Canada … there’s many, many opportunities. My view is that for a similar amount of work you get a bigger payout at the end,” he said.

Asked what governments can do to bolster the AI sector here, Jeannot doesn’t hesitate: “Invest more in the entrepreneurs.”

“There’s a lot of competent people, a lot of good businesses, but lack of funding is still a very big problem,” he says.

The power of collaboration

No matter what Canada does to keep itself in the AI game, sector experts say we must work with China to some degree.

“We don’t historically have a really great track record of collaboration with China, but there may be an opportunity to explore that,” Strome said.

“They’re going to drive innovation forward, they’re going to explore some challenging areas, develop new technologies, products and services that we’re not going to be able to do in Canada.”

Gordon Houlden, director of the University of Alberta’s China Institute, thinks about collaboration every single day. On balance, he’s in favour of partnerships with China — as long as we go in “with eyes wide open.”

Houden points to the example of Huawei, the Chinese mobile giant trying to make headway into the 5G mobile infrastructure sector in the west. National security concerns about the Chinese government’s role in the company have seen it blocked at every turn by nations including the U.S. and Australia.

“The idea that we wouldn’t have AI collaboration with China to me is not reasonable. I see no advantage to cutting ourselves off,” he says from his Edmonton office.

Gordon Houlden, director of the University of Alberta’s China Institute, thinks about collaboration between Canada and China every single day.Emma Graney /
Postmedia

Yet he admits it could be increasingly difficult, as trade tensions grow ever stronger between the United States — our largest trading partner — and China. He worries that distrust could result in Canadian trade policy being dictated or vastly restricted by the U.S.

As a small, trade-dependent country, that would only hurt Canada. After all, he says, China is a powerful country whether the west likes it or not, home to 20 per cent of the world’s population and the globe’s second-largest economy.

“I don’t think it’s too late to have a balanced relationship with China, with eyes wide open, where we protect what we have and benefit from sharing with them,” Houlden said.

“It takes organization and policy direction, because if we willy-nilly share everything, we will ensure nervousness in Ottawa and wrath in Washington. On the other hand, there are things to be learned in AI.”

Artificial intelligence isn’t just about security and surveillance, Houlden said, despite China’s focus on the area.

“It’s a broad-spectrum thing that goes from having better traffic flows and running buses more efficiently to surveillance and a lot of other things,” he said.

Then he gets philosophical.

“AI will allow lots of tremendously interesting things to occur. Technology is always like that — it cuts both ways.” The printing press, for example, allowed mass education but also resulted in the publication of pornography and racist tirades.

Schaeffer points to China’s existing collaboration with his own university as proof the country is willing to partner, and, perhaps more importantly, to put money on the table.

He sees a seismic shift underway.

The U.S. used to be the scientific centre of the world, he says, but it’s very clear China is going to take over that leadership role. Things take a long time to happen in North America, he said, because grant systems here are so bureaucratic.

“There’s one aspect that makes it fundamentally different and why they’re going to pull into the lead and build an enormous lead that will be very difficult to overcome, and that is nimbleness,” he said.

“They have lots of money and they’re not afraid to spend it.”

To respond to China’s rocketing AI expertise, Shaeffer warns we must be prepared to make targeted investments and do our best to cope with the superpower’s fiscal flexibility.

“That nimbleness means the U.S. will be eclipsed, Canada is eclipsed,” he said.

“That gap between China and the rest of the world will grow very quickly.”

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